Thursday, July 24, 2014

Hillman Hospital & How It Became UAB Hospital

The oldest building in the UAB
Medical Center, now known as “Old Hillman”, is located on the block bounded by
19th and 20th Streets and 6th and 7th
Avenues South. The four-story stone and brick structure was dedicated in July,
1903, and named Hillman Hospital after local benefactor Thomas Hillman,
President of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. The hospital was
constructed on lots 1-6 of the block, purchased from John S. Cox. He had bought
the land from the Elyton Land Company in 1877 for $250. A Victorian house on
the property was used as the hospital’s first nursing dormitory.

Efforts to organize a charity
hospital for the city had begun in 1884, and Hillman’s donations had helped
fund several locations, including a 100-bed facility that burned in 1894.
Hillman required that his support pay for wards for both white and black
patients. Hillman Hospital was chartered by the state legislature in 1897 and
operated by a Board of Lady Managers—wives of local businessmen, a group
involved from the beginning as the Daughters of United Charity.

Hillman Hospital in 1908

The four
floors and basement were crowded with various facilities, including offices,
reception rooms, a laundry, store rooms, and boiler and fuel room for the steam
heat. Twelve private rooms and four adult and one child wards occupied most of
the first and second floors. The third floor held a surgical amphitheater that
could hold up to 80 students, sterilizing and ether rooms, two private
operating rooms and more private patient rooms. The fourth floor held the
kitchen (with dumb waiter access to other floors), nurses’ dormitory rooms, a
dining hall and yet more private rooms.

By 1924 over
4600 patients a year were treated at Hillman. Financial difficulties had
continued, and in 1907 the land and building were sold to the Jefferson County
Board of Revenue. An annex built in 1913 failed to relieve the overcrowding of
the 90 beds that Dr. Will Mayo had noted on his visit in 1911. Finally the “new” Hillman Building opened in
1928, followed eleven years later by a five story outpatient clinic.

Hillman Hospital
complex, ca. 1929. The original structure on the right was erected in 1902 and
the annex, in the middle, was added in 1913. On the left is the 1928 addition,
or “new” Hillman. Source: Birmingham Public Library

Those seats
in the main surgical amphitheater of Hillman Hospital were filled by faculty
and students from the Birmingham Medical College. The school was a proprietary
college owned by nine prominent Birmingham physicians and opened in October
1894. The college and the Birmingham Dental College were first located in a
five-story building on 21st Street North originally occupied by the
Lunsford Hotel. The school had electric lighting, lecture rooms, several
laboratories and operated a free dispensary. Students were also exposed to
patients at the city charity hospital, infirmaries owned by faculty members and
clinics in nearby towns.

In 1902 the
college constructed its new home next to Hillman Hospital and a two-story
autopsy house behind it. By that time the school had 94 students who were
required to study four terms instead of the original two. In 1910 the medical
and dental schools merged to become the Birmingham Medical, Dental and
Pharmaceutical College. One of the school’s achievements was the 1899
graduation of Elizabeth White. She was the second female to graduate from an
Alabama medical school, following Louisa Shepard who had graduated from the
Grafenberg Medical Institute in Dadeville in the 1850s.

Despite
improvements in facilities, funding and graduation requirements, the Birmingham Medical College closed in May, 1915. Six years earlier Abraham Flexner had inspected the
Birmingham school and the Medical College of Alabama in Mobile. He and his team
were touring the country gathering information on all the nation’s medical
schools for the American Medical Association. His 1910 report was very critical
of most of those schools, including the two in Alabama; many schools,
especially proprietary ones, closed in the next few years. The Birmingham
school’s owners sold it to the University of Alabama, which operated it until
the final students graduated. After a move to Tuscaloosa, the University’s
Medical College of Alabama opened in Birmingham in September, 1945, using
Jefferson Hospital as its base of operations.

Before that
major change another building was constructed on the block in addition to the
outpatient clinic already mentioned. In 1929 Hillman Hospital opened a nursing
dormitory. The structure was renovated and reopened in July 1965 as the Roy R.
Kracke Clinical Services Building. Kracke was the first dean of the Medical
College of Alabama when it opened in Birmingham.

Roy R. Kracke, M.D. [1887-1950] Source: National Library of Medicine/Images in the History of Medicine

By the 1930s
another expansion of Hillman Hospital was desperately needed. The County
Commission hired prominent local architect Charles H. McCauley to design a
seven-story annex to cost $1.5 million in U.S. Public Works Administration
funds. By the time the building was dedicated in December 1940, nine more
floors were added at a final cost of $2.25 million.

1939 architect's
rendering of Jefferson Hospital Source: BhamWiki

The new
hospital was state-of-the-art and known as the finest hospital in the South.
Two banks of high-speed elevators carried doctors, nurses, patients and others
from floor to floor. The fifth floor was a maternity ward; the seventh floor
featured eleven operating rooms. Both of those floors were air conditioned. The
top two floors had living space for 150 nurses and 25 interns and resident
physicians. From March 1942 until April 1944 two of the floors were used for
secret work by the U.S. Army Replacement and School Command. Responsible for
personnel training, the unit’s headquarters had been relocated to Birmingham
from Washington, D.C., to protect it from possible enemy attack.

Four years
later the facility became the Jefferson-Hillman Hospital where the new Medical
College of Alabama would soon be located. The UA Board of Trustees renamed it
University Hospital in 1955 and finally Jefferson Tower in 1979. By September
2010 all inpatient activities had been relocated to the new North Pavilion
hospital complex and other areas.

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About Me

When not searching for the secret of the universe, I do research and writing on Alabama and/or medical history. I write poetry now and then. Spending time with my wife Dianne and children Amos and Becca is also important. And then there are the cats....